


dead hearts are everywhere

by Kirbita22



Category: Neopets
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 19:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirbita22/pseuds/Kirbita22
Summary: Gorix doesn't go to the funeral.





	dead hearts are everywhere

Gorix doesn't go to the funeral. It's probably incredibly rude, he realizes, but he just doesn't see anything good coming from it. 

Scout goes, and that's cool because her parents know her and she's better at talking to people; a handful of assorted Resistance members who knew her go too, and hopefully show how important she was to all of them. Valka goes, thought Gorix knows he doesn't want to be there either, but he feels he has to be, because he thinks it's his fault. 

It's not, though, Gorix knows. He wasn't the one who put her there in the first place.

Ironically, the biggest reason Valka is there is the biggest reason Gorix isn't. How is he going to apologize for stealing their daughter away? What words could he ever give them that would make up for a loss so monumental?

There's none, so Gorix doesn't try. Instead, he curls himself up in his bed and shuts his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he grabs her hand and runs, and runs, and runs; and the moment he ruined her life doesn't end.

(There's no point in last goodbyes when she's not there to hear them anyways. Having a corpse to talk to makes no difference.)

* * *

For the next few weeks, he feels empty. He lays on his bed, not changing position for hours on end, feeling devoid of life.

Valka doesn't send him in any missions for a while- and while it's annoying, he has to admit it's probably not smart to send a spy who currently passes the hours fantasizing about dropping dead in the middle of a battlefield because it would be so much easier than having to deal with being himself and alive at the moment.

He only ever leaves his room at lunchtime, because he has to. Scout offered to bring him food over at first, but he refused; he knows he needs some motivation not to rot away in his bed.

In the hallways, people give him their condolences, which is awkward because he really doesn't deserve them. Losing her hurts, sure, hurts so much sometimes he forgets how to breathe, hurts so badly he sometimes screams into a pillow for half an hour and it doesn't help at all, but the thing is- she wasn't his to lose. She never was, and he has to remind himself of this constantly because in the Resistance, she was always his partner, his friend, his everything; but Cylara was never his, really. 

(If anything, he was hers, but that's a thought too painful to consider.)

He pretends he doesn't hear the whispers- poor boy, they say, how many people will he lose? And just as he was getting over _him_... him, him, he always comes up, it's always a compare and constrast of the way he lost them both. And honestly, it pisses him off, because he's been trying his damnedest not to compare them! And when you're spending your days locked away in your head thinking about one person, avoiding elephants in the room gets harder with every passing minute.

But he promised himself long ago that he wasn't going to be mourn him again. He'd done that already, gone trough this already. And it had been a different kind of pain, he remembers: while now it's a dull, pounding ache that weights over him crushing him slowly, with him it was a raw and burning pain that sent him kicking and screaming and crying. It had been like getting ripped apart in half, with no prior warning. 

And Parlax hadn't deserved that, he hadn't deserved to be mourned, to be missed, to be spilled even a single tear for; so he'd decided he wasn't going to go trough it again. Everything that happened to him after betrayal was his own responsability, and Gorix refused to hurt for him any longer.

But with her, it was different, because she wouldn't have even been there for the blaster to hit if it wasn't for him. He was the one who encouraged her to go on more missions, to learn how to defend herself, to become an active resistance member. Of course, she wouldn't have done all of these things if she hadn't wanted to, he knows that much, but he could have stopped her. He could have put her out of harms way, and he chose not to.

He forces himself to finish his food despite his lack of appetite, and locks himself away again.

* * *

Deep down, he knows he only did it because he was lonely. Deeply, profoundly lonely- and Cylara had barged into a part of his heart that he thought was off limits to everyone, and had befriended him in record time. She'd saved her life thrice in the first day they met- and that's not even taking into account saving the entire world.

So it's not like she wasn't as amazing as he said she was- she absolutely was! A prodigy, even; she got the hang of everything astonishingly quick, and figured out codes and maps at lightning speed. 

But the thing is, she didn't need to. She didn't need to be there. He was there because he had to be, because it was all he was good for, because he depended on this in more ways than he'd rather admit.

She was there for a good time. She didn't need to be there for the blaster to hit.

* * *

It's not until a year has passed, when everyone in the station has forgotten about her loss, that he finally admits to himself that he loved her. 

That night he locks himself into his room and allows himself to cry, to cry until he has no tears left to spill. 

He owes it to her to move on, though. So the following morning he decides that was the last tear he had to spill for her. And obviously he can't ever forget her- that would just be insulting; but he doesn't have to. 

Every time he steps into his world, the world of danger and menace and death he grew up in, he remembers she's not here anymore because she never should have been in the first place, and that's his burden to carry. But he continues to walk forward because it's not his burden to be crushed by, but to live with.

If there's nothing else he ever did for her, she at least deserves to be lived on for.


End file.
